


The Handle Toward My Hand

by bold_seer



Category: Historical RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Noir, F/F, Father-Daughter Relationship, Ficlet, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 18:39:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9397913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bold_seer/pseuds/bold_seer
Summary: There was a photo of a dead man on her desk, but death was nothing new.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cockaigne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cockaigne/gifts).



There was a photo of a dead man on her desk, but death was nothing new. In her line of work, she’d found she had the heart and stomach of an undertaker. 

_Crime ain’t a job for a girl, Lizzie_ , her father had said, cruel and callous with illness and age, after a tumultuous career in the police force. Too much drink, too many failed marriages and unhappy affairs. 

But she was used to ruthlessness and loss from an early age, by example. First her mother’s disappearance, then her stepmother dying in childbirth. People always coming and going. There was the simple country girl who’d answered her father’s personal ad with a vaguely flattering photo. The teenage beauty queen he’d deserted. The nurse at the end. Everyone had died or been discarded, all part of a desperate mission for a son and heir, her baby brother.

She wanted to love him, and sometimes thought she had, but she had also vowed three things: to equal him, to surpass him and to never marry.

Mrs Stuart was in her twenties, exceedingly pale, with auburn hair, darker than her own – striking looks that had already proved the undoing of one man.

“My husband,” Mrs Stuart – Mary – started. She bit her lip.

She’d had a sister, once. Mary. _Maria._

But Maria, too, was gone; it was Mary Stuart who was grasping her hands. “I have so very little to give, but - oh - would you consider,” she said breathlessly. Without finishing the question or waiting for an answer, she reached into her handbag. She picked something up and let it fall onto Elizabeth’s palm.

It was a wedding ring.


End file.
